Ippodo

Branding

E-commerce

Portfolio

Ippodo is a family-owned business that has been producing high-quality and authentic tea for generations. They have a long history of cultivating, selecting, and blending the best tea leaves from various regions of Japan. Their mission is to share the joy and culture of Japanese tea with the world, and to offer their customers a satisfying and enriching tea experience.

Brief

A design concept for their online website that radiates a unique blend of tradition, elegance, and luxury that's synonymous with Japanese tea culture. I knew that traditional patterns and cultural themes were the secret ingredients to showcase the company's heritage, and wanted to add a touch of that to truly make the brand shine.

Strategy

With brief in mind, the website design is inspired by the thought ‘you can visit our tea house and enjoy your tea experience wherever you are’. And so I’ve created a visually-driven experience that would truly transport users to a Japanese tea house realm. The selection of colors, fonts, and visual elements was carefully curated to evoke that distinct vibe, along with intuitive navigation and user-friendly features to make the user’s journey from one tea to the next a breeze.

Outcome

A website that's as visually appealing as it is immersive. Guests are greeted with a tea house-like experience that's both elegant and engaging, with traditional elements blending seamlessly with just the right amount of luxury. Visitors can navigate with ease, thanks to the intuitive design, which will lead to a significant increase in user engagement and overall brand perception.

The brand heart element

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Ippodo’s original brand qualities, hand-drawn crayon-textured illustrations is their signature throughout their brand. These unique, quirky illustrations bring joy, encourages creativity, and delivers a humanized experience to their consumers. This helps promote a sense of connection with the brand. The illustrations usually depict scenes of tea making, drinking, friends/family gatherings, as well as the feelings of positivity and energy, which is not only what the brand whishes to convey, but is part of the joy of drinking tea.

A view of green tea fields and hills under a light blue sky

Simplification & Color

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Tea can get confusing, especially when you don’t know where to start. Which is why I have selected the top-most parent categories of their tea (Matcha, Sencha, Gyokuro & Bancha).

Each have been given a matching distinctive color to ease scannability during search, as they are all unique from one another, and so deserve to be recognized as such.

Any item that falls under a general line such as utensils, kits and so-on, follows the brands primary color of brick red, which can be seen in the display shots below.

Products section - desktop screenshot collection

Credits

Photos from Ippodo Official and Pexels (Quang Nguyen Vinh and Eline Sun)

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Life.Ana

Branding

E-commerce